Jesus Never Told Believers to Go to Church

I don’t go to a church anymore — at least not in the traditional sense.

I still get together with a group of other believers, though — every week, in fact. We sit around a fire in a backyard, eat good food, drink a few beers, share our struggles, and chat about life and faith together. Jesus is there most weeks as well!

It’s church enough for me.

However, when one of the other guys who comes along to my little backyard church wanted to volunteer for a parachurch organization, he was told that he was not allowed because he didn’t attend a ‘real’ church.

That made me mad.

Why?

Because actually, my expression of Church is no less ‘real’ than the ones that gather on a Sunday morning in massive auditoriums with hundreds of people who pay thousands of dollars a year to listen to a so-called expert. In fact, these people seem to forget that before so-called religious people turned Christianity into an industry, church gatherings happened in homes, not church buildings.

It begs that question, doesn’t it, is the church we have today the church that Jesus had in mind? Before you go ahead and judge the church in my backyard, don’t you think you should take a look at what Jesus said about church?

Heck, why don’t we do that right now?

Jesus and Church

So, what did Jesus say about the church? This ought to be the shortest article I have ever written. Believe it or not, Jesus only used the word “church” twice. On the first occasion, Jesus speaks prophetically to his disciple Peter in Matthew 16:18. Jesus says:

“So I tell you, you are Peter. And I will build my church on this rock. And the power of hell will not be able to overcome it.”

On the second occasion, Jesus is giving some instructions to those listening on how they ought to address conflict when it arises. Those words are found in Matthew 18:15–17. Jesus says:

“If your brother or sister in God’s family does something wrong, go and tell them what they did wrong. Do this when you are alone with them. If they listen to you, then you have helped them to be your brother or sister again. But if they refuse to listen, go to them again and take one or two people with you. Then there will be two or three people who will be able to tell all that happened.

If they refuse to listen to them, tell the church. And if they refuse to listen to the church, treat them as you would treat someone who does not know God or who is a tax collector.”

Besides these two occasions, Jesus never mentions or uses the word church. So, when he did say it, what exactly did he mean? Let’s take a look.

What did Jesus mean?

The word that Jesus used for “church” was originally a Greek term, “Ekklesia,” which literally means “community” or even “society.” In Ancient Greece, the Ekklesia was the assembly or gathering of free citizens to discuss, debate, and decide upon legal matters by democratic process.

The word “Ekklesia” was a compound word of two segments: “Ek,” a preposition meaning “out of,” and a verb, “Kaleo,” signifying “to call.” Together, it literally meant “to call out” or “called-out ones.” So, Ekkeslia meant both inviting people to form a group (the call) and the outcome of that invitation (the gathering of the “called”).

Ekklesia simply meant community.

Therefore the word “Church” refers to a people, not a reference to a place. Moreover, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “ekklesia” is the only word ever used for the church in the New Testament.

There is no other definition of church.

Period.

So, those listening to Jesus when he talked about “church” would have understood him to mean simply — “the community of believers.” One thing is certain: when Jesus used the word, he most certainly was not talking about an institution with a building and a hierarchical structure.

Therefore, when he said to the apostle Peter in Matthew 16:18 that he would build his church through him, he was not talking about a brick-and-mortar project. He was talking about building a universal community of “Jesus people.”

And how about the other occasion where Jesus mentions “church” in Matthew 18:15–17? In these verses, he says that if you have a grievance with someone and can’t sort it out between the two of you, bring it before the church.

Regretfully, this passage has been used and abused by churches down through the ages as the prooftext for dodgy systems of church discipline. When viewed incorrectly, this verse places the authority to judge right from wrong — on behalf of God — in the hands of those in positions of power within the church. Sure, some leaders may have used such a power benevolently, but many have not. It has paved the way for spiritual abuse and exploitation.

However, if you understand the word “church” as the “community” as it was originally intended, then Jesus’s instructions in Matthew 18 become much more reasonable, transparent, and likely to produce a more fair result.

Under the Ekklesia model, when two people are in conflict, and two forms of private intervention have failed to resolve that conflict, the case is to be brought before the society at large. The appeal is not to be made to any rulers of a congregation but to the congregation itself, and the public opinion of the “Ekklesia” is to be brought to bear upon the offender.

Should he defy the prevailing view of the community and continue to do that which is deemed inappropriate by his community, he, by virtue of his actions, excommunicates himself, doesn’t he? After all, aren’t all societies justified in excluding those from their communities who repudiate the very conditions of their membership?

Church misdefined

If you pay a visit to Dictionary.com and look up the word “church,” here is what you will find:

“1. A building for public Christian worship.

2. The public worship of God or a religious service in such a building: to attend church regularly.
3. The whole body of Christian believers; Christendom.
4. Any division of this body professing the same creed and acknowledging the same ecclesiastical authority; a Christian denomination.”

I would argue that only one of these definitions actually represents what Jesus had in mind when he talked about Church: The whole body of Christian believers (minus the word ‘Christendom,’ which is a concept that would make Christ turn in his grave — if he were still in it).

And since Jesus was supposedly the force behind the church, you have to ask where all these phony definitions of the church came from. Could it be that all these other definitions help perpetuate the system?

The word “Church” was not in the Bible

What if I told you that when the Bible was first published, it didn’t contain the word “church?” Would you find that hard to believe?

Well, in fact, in the Tyndale Bible — published in 1524 as the first complete English Bible — the word “church” was nowhere to be found. Rather, it used the word “congregation” to better reflect the true intent of Ekklesia.

As time went by, the word “congregation” was substituted with the word “church,” which eventually replaced almost all 115 mentions of the word “Ekklesia” in the New Testament. Sadly, when translators inserted the word “church” in English versions of the Bible, they included a word — with all its associated baggage — that did not reflect the original intent of Jesus’s words.

Reclaiming true “Church.”

From the very little that Jesus said about the church, can we draw a few conclusions about what church should be?

Yes.

First and foremost, Church is not a building, a place, or an hour-and-a-half of dedicated time on a Sunday morning. Rather, the church is a universal community united around a common belief that cannot be contained within walls. It meets in coffee shops, on mountain tops, and around kitchen tables — as much as in grand cathedrals. Jesus never commanded people to “go” to church but to “be” the church.

Secondly, the church, as Jesus described it (particularly in Matthew 18), does not possess the kinds of power differentials that exist in many of today’s churches. In the church Jesus describes, problems and conflict appear to be thrown to the community, rather than any organized leadership, to discuss and work through. There’s something refreshingly democratic about that, isn’t there? To be honest, I’m not sure that Jesus was thinking about formal, hierarchical leadership structures at all when he talked about church.

Thirdly, the model for gathering the Ekklesia that Jesus seemed to espouse — and indeed the model reflected throughout the New Testament — was to gather, eat, share, remember him, and love one another.

That sure sounds like the church in my backyard!

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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